Monthly Archives: November 2011

Keep Your Hands Off My Junk

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We used to call it our “privates” because we (allegedly) value our privacy and don’t want to show off our, well, junk.

Everybody in the known universe (except in Andromeda) knows that Facebook and privacy don’t mix well. Frankly, the Innernoodle and privacy don’t mix well but that’s another story. Facebook is >||< close to settling with the Federal Trade Commission after the FTC charged the social networking site with issues related to your privacy and mine. See, Facebook has access to a lot of our junk and they keep changing how they will display it.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reminded PBS viewers that everything Facebook knows about us is everything we have put there. Other companies, he said, like Microsoft and Google and Yahoo, “have search engines and ad networks, have a huge amount of information about you. It’s just that they’re collecting that information about you behind your back really. But you never know that… it’s less transparent than what is happening at Facebook.”

I can keep my junk hidden from the Interwebs simply by not using the Interwebs. No Facebook. No Google. No online bill paying. No Netflix streaming.

[Image]Meanwhile, the bank known as Chase Manhattan until it merged with J.P. Morgan a decade ago, is one of the Big Four banks of the United States. I’ve been a Chase customer since I got my first “BankAmericard” in the late 1960s.

Chase sent me a privacy notice with a lot of little aptitude-test ovals to fill in completely. I’ve never been one to color inside the lines but I did my best. “We’re going to send you junk mail from these guys.” NO THANK YOU. “We’re going to bill you for these other guys.” NO THANK YOU. “We have this wonderful offer for …” NO THANK YOU.

I can keep my junk hidden from Chase as long as I send in the “opt-out” form. Every five years. Unless they ask for it more often. Like tomorrow.

The St. Albans Messenger reports that the village of Richford has become the first northwestern Vermont community to install law enforcement surveillance cameras on its streets; their two new cameras cost five grand (money that was to have underwritten a second constable). The live video feeds directly to the Sheriff’s Office via the Internet. U.S. Border Patrol and Vermont State Police also have access to the feed. The cameras were installed as a “safety measure” in response to concerns from residents about area crime but not all residents are happy about the cameras.

Richford officials remind us that Richford is not the first to have cameras trained on its streets. Public Access TV has cameras looking at the streets in both St. Albans and Enosburg, officials said. The fact is that those cameras were not installed at taxpayer expense and those cameras don’t feed Law Enforcement.

I can keep my junk hidden from Richford’s cameras as long as I …
Oh. Wait. I can’t keep my junk hidden from Richford’s cameras.

The World Naked Bike Ride got me thinking about this question I found online: “Imagine that you live in a place where public nudity is not only legal, but also socially acceptable. Assuming that the climate is favorable, how often would you be totally naked in public?”

In that case, I’d opt in to show off my junk.

Dead? Dead

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Burlington, VT (October 28)–Our own local group of Occupy Wall Streeters began a weekend encampment in City Hall Park in Burlington today, but it’s unclear whether they’ll be allowed to stay in the park overnight. Under city ordinances, people are forbidden from sleeping in parks after 10 p.m. or setting up tents and bedding for that purpose. The Vermont Workers’ Center, meanwhile, “encourages everyone to stop by with family and friends to celebrate the right to peaceably assemble and to exercise the right to free speech.”

It’s a real conflict. Most of Burlington’s city government is pretty much on the OWS side but there is a farmer’s market in the park on Saturday, so Occupy Wall Street is gonna end up Occupying Main Street and fouling local commerce.

“Real change can happen and it feels to me like it’s starting to simmer…” my friend Enola “Fanny” Guay said.

That may well be, but the issue still comes down to a single question: Do the protesters have a defined goal?

I was in college during the anti-war protests of the 60s. Looking back on my actual experience, there were a lot of different, non-homogenous groups running around but they all had one over-riding goal: they would shout and shout until the war came tumbling down.

I don’t remember any protesters shooting each other.

Burlington, VT (November 10)–Police are investigating three deaths — two fatal shootings and an apparent overdose — at or near Occupy protest camps last Thursday.

A young man was fatally shot Thursday evening just yards from the Occupy Oakland encampment outside City Hall. And a homeless veteran died after shooting himself in the head in a tent in Burlington’s City Hall Park, where the local Occupy movement has set up tentkeeping. Police here cordoned off part of the park as a crime scene sparking a confrontation with the protesters.

Also on Friday, a 42-year-old man was found dead inside his tent at Occupy Salt Lake City in Utah. Officials believe he died from a combination of drugs and carbon monoxide poisoning.

[Image]This sign is making the social network and email rounds.

“It’s obvious the sign maker and all the Facebook copycats are either blind to or unwilling to discuss the class advantages and good luck that bolstered their hard work,” Fanny Guay said.

That’s Fanny-speak for “we need to take away that advantage so no one can get ahead of anyone else.”

It’s particularly worrisome that most of the OWS simmering comes together that way. After all, most of Vermont’s flower children had liberal college educations that their parents provided. Many of Vermont’s flower children have grown up to accumulate the advantages and luck

And here in Vermont, it is mostly the children and children’s children of privilege who band together to protest.

All curmudgeonliness aside, OWS could be a good thing if they stay peaceful. Protesting our problems is an American tradition and Wall Streeters getting $100 million bonuses from tax money is a problem.

If the simmering does come together, the OWS might have something to shout and shout about, a cause that allows every man, woman, and child to live in an identical, government-owned house, with identical, government-provided healthcare, watching identical, government-programmed television. As long as everyone can have a television.

I wouldn’t bank on it.

For now? It seems like all noise and no tumbling. And it’s dying a blusterous death.

11.11.11

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End times?

The New Tork Times reported today that scientists have begun to take concerns about an anthropogenically-caused Andromeda-Milky Way collision more seriously.

The Andromeda-Milky Way collision is a predicted galaxy collision that could take place in the measurable future between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. The Milky Way is a smallish, barred, spiral galaxy that contains the Solar System along with about 400 billion stars. Andromeda is a “nearby” galactic neighbor with about twice as many stars. The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are approaching each other at a speed of 300,000 miles per hour.

These simulations of the impeding Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy collision, one a simulation of the University of Toronto, have scientists wondering if mankind will survive this collision.

“Just as greenhouse gases are the steroids of weather, the wobble in the Earth’s rotation caused by the increasing heat is having an effect on the systems around us,” Dr. William Hogarth, a senior Fluidics Professor of Biological Oceanography, said at a briefing held by the National Center for Deep Space Research. “We need to start not only reducing the spin, but the data is showing that perhaps we’ll even need to change our orbit.”

The discipline called geoengineering was originally dismissed as science fiction or even fantasy but geoengineers have shown that they can defeat global climate change by cooling the planet with sun-blocking particles or shades, by adding reflectivity to clouds to make them return more solar radiation to space, and by constructing a 26-mile diameter carbon nanotube to remove vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere and “duct” it into space.

“We now have definitive computer models that show just how rapidly the collision is approaching,” Dr. Hogarth said.

Still, skeptics are still concerned about the possible unintended consequences of tinkering on a large scale with planetary and galactic orbits.

“We do need to act now,” Dr. Hogarth said.

“Without intervention, today, by the time that the two galaxies collide, the surface of the Earth may have become far too hot for liquid water to exist. That would end all terrestrial life as we know it even as the luminosity of the Sun increases.”

Remember, you heard it here first, 11/11/11.